The MediaPad 7 Lite delivered decent performance. When it came time for web browsing, it got the job done, albeit a bit slowly. Not painfully slow, by any means, but it was noticeable at times. When viewing images on the MediaPad 7 Lite, it took a few seconds for the image to clear. The tablet completed multi-touch gestures with ease; I was able to pinch to zoom, double tap to zoom, and quickly swipe side to side.

As far as the benchmarks, it fell behind its competitors on both the Quadrant and Sunpsider benchmark tests.

Sunspider is a Javascript benchmark for measuring browser performance. Lower numbers are better.

The keyboard was another story, however. It was unresponsive and so slow that I was often two or three letters ahead of the tablet, and I found myself constantly editing words for missing letters. The keyboard magnifies each key you hit, which I found a little distracting and it seemed to create an extra delay in responsiveness. Another thing to note, when I made edits to text, I would click where I wanted the cursor to go and sometimes it would bounce back to the end of the text.

The MediaPad 7 Lite handled simple games well, however, like Angry Birds, which comes pre-installed on the Android tablet. The graphics looked great and gameplay was smooth and responsive. The MediaPad 7 Lite came with other apps already installed like Kingston Office, which is already free in the Google Play app store. It offers a word processor app, slideshow presentation app, spreadsheet app, and a memo creator. These are versatile, easy to use, and should work in a pinch, though MediaPad keyboard issues will make some bouts of frustration.

I exhausted the battery by leaving the tablet on full brightness while streaming Captain America on Netflix. The battery life lasted just over 3 hours during this test. It would give the user enough time to watch a movie, and maybe browse the web a bit, but not much else. Huawei does not advertise a specific battery life, but it does note on its website that it depends on usage, especially with cellular data. Also, it’s important to note that this tablet did not come with a wall charger. There was a USB to microUSB cord in the box, which I plugged into my laptop to charge. If the device was on, I was not able to get a charge, it would maintain but it wouldn’t increase. The user needs to be sure the device is off when charging, otherwise you will not see the charge increase, but it does maintain a charge.